Plot vs Writing

[mitchhamilton]

guys, guys remember, its all about the h.

 

 

 

writing for me. it just controls so much of any story and if it doesnt work, it can ruin the entire experience. writing is everything, it sets up and delivers everything. it is essential to drive the characters and events forward. it would be like a game of marco polo but without polo. youd just be playing polo and who wants to play that? ill tell you who, satanists thats who. point is, writing all the way.

 

 

...ignore any mistakes i may have made grammar and spelling wise despite my passionate speech about writing. 

[Narcosis]

It's worth to note, it's best to treat writing skill as a "tool of trade", of sorts.

To be honest, I did chose "the writing" as a more important part within the pool, but in reality, without an intriguing and well constructed story, even the best kind of writing won't be ever able to shine. It's how things roll; those two things are mutually irreplaceable and one cannot truly exist without another. The end result of how good a vn (or any story-driven game) ends as is the sum of both of those parts. True masterpieces scale on a level, that is typically unreachable to a vast majority of writers - one, that requires both immense talent, skill, knowledge and imagination. Only a couple handfulls of people in history reached that kind of prowess, but I'm glad new ones pop up every once in a while.

In all honesty, though. A lot of writers - professionals - will tell you that; As much as imagination is a world of your own, that cannot be replicated, nor replaced, writing is something everyone can learn as a skill. It all boils down to a proper set of tools and space to keep them in, as much as your own willingness to keep them in proper working order.

If you ever thought about pursuing that kind of career, you have to only keep two things in mind. That is, read a lot and write a lot. That's about it. The rest is up to you.

[Clephas]

I'm going to go a bit out on a limb here and say that 'overall presentation' whips the ass of both.  I've found that it is possible for a cliched and predictable story to be deeply touching simply due to how it is presented.  Music direction (when and how the music is used), art direction (how the art is utilized, including character expressions and poses), and even issues like repeated text are all a part of the presentation, attached at the hip to the story/plot.  To be blunt, VNs that fail in more than one of these areas tend to fall way behind others.  I can take a VN that has second-rate art if the music is well-utilized, and I can enjoy a VN with poor music utilization that uses its art well, but if both are poorly utilized, the game becomes eminently forgettable.  Games like Komorebi no Nostalgica and Hapymaher, which rely on their visual and audio aspects to enhance storytelling and writing tend to have a lot more impact than VNs that merely have a good plot/story or excellent writing.

In other words, ignoring any element of the VN genre leads to lower overall quality, and neither writing nor story alone can completely overcome that limitation.

Also, if the story is poorly written, then it fails as a story anyway, lol.  Case in point... the Hunger Games book, the Crest of the Stars books *vomits at his memories of the former's prose and the latter's horrible, juvenile translation*.

[Funnerific]

39 minutes ago, Clephas said:

I'm going to go a bit out on a limb here and say that 'overall presentation' whips the ass of both.  I've found that it is possible for a cliched and predictable story to be deeply touching simply due to how it is presented.  Music direction (when and how the music is used), art direction (how the art is utilized, including character expressions and poses), and even issues like repeated text are all a part of the presentation, attached at the hip to the story/plot.  To be blunt, VNs that fail in more than one of these areas tend to fall way behind others.  I can take a VN that has second-rate art if the music is well-utilized, and I can enjoy a VN with poor music utilization that uses its art well, but if both are poorly utilized, the game becomes eminently forgettable.  Games like Komorebi no Nostalgica and Hapymaher, which rely on their visual and audio aspects to enhance storytelling and writing tend to have a lot more impact than VNs that merely have a good plot/story or excellent writing.

In other words, ignoring any element of the VN genre leads to lower overall quality, and neither writing nor story alone can completely overcome that limitation.

Also, if the story is poorly written, then it fails as a story anyway, lol.  Case in point... the Hunger Games book, the Crest of the Stars books *vomits at his memories of the former's prose and the latter's horrible, juvenile translation*.

You read regular books too, right? What is more important to you when you do?

[Clephas]

 

5 minutes ago, Funnerific said:

You read regular books too, right? What is more important to you when you do?

Generally speaking, no matter how vast and epic the story, if it is poorly written, it sucks.  This fact actually feeds into the statement that the best works of literature suck as movies.  Tsukihime is excellently written, but the nonexistent *snickers* anime sucks donkey butt because it wasn't designed to be told as a single-branch story, meaning that it didn't make any sense when they tried to make it into a cohesive whole.  Shuffle, on the other hand, had a second-rate writer, but the anime version was several levels better (if only because Kaede was awesome).

[Chronopolis]

10 hours ago, Sovapex said:

Character development hinges on both writing and plot. Without plot there's no development, but without decent writing, the presentation of that development is almost fated to be bad. Development is one of the hardest things to realistically pull off. You can't kill a person's dog and then have them wake up the next day to be fully independent - it's a long, hard grueling process. I've seen characters pretty much spontaneously defeat their inner demons because people simply told them to before. 

Plus, content of the dialogue and how the dialogue is presented. Isn't that pretty much exactly the same thing? 

Apologies for wording it unclear. The content of the dialogue would be like what the author plans the characters to talk about in a scene. What I meant by 'how the dialogue is presented' is how well that plan got executed and turned into a dialogue.

All I'm including in writing is the technical writing ability: the ability to make narration, dialogue, and sentence shine. When I read 'story' in the OP, I'm thinking about everything else. Not just the plot or original idea, but also the characters, and thought put into character development and interactions.

When I see a very skilled author carve a metaphorical pagoda out of just a carrot (a story which hasn't that much thought/meaning/substance to it), it's still a carrot to me, even though you can appreciate all their skill.

 

Edited December 11, 2016 by Chronopolis

[Norleas]

One reminder that writing is a subjective aspect in some areas, some people think that is a fixed matter that you could arbitrary evaluate, but depending of the writer the same phrase could be written in totally different ways, more direct, more metaphorical, too verbal, solid descriptions, vague prose and much more styles. All could have the same quality in general, but depending of taste of who is reading it will look better or worse.

For example, a few weeks ago, i was discussing with a friend a Portuguese book that we read "Ventos Cruzados"(Crossed Winds), it's a work that rely in metaphors and vague descriptions and this go from the first to the last page, i love that way to make prose, but my friend prefer a more traditional romance dialogue. In result to me the work is a 8, but to he is a 5.5 and this difference is practically all in the way that we evaluate the writing style. 

[Funnerific]

37 minutes ago, Norleas said:

One reminder that writing is a subjective aspect in some areas, some people think that is a fixed matter that you could arbitrary evaluate, but depending of the writer the same phrase could be written in totally different ways, more direct, more metaphorical, too verbal, solid descriptions, vague prose and much more styles. All could have the same quality in general, but depending of taste of who is reading it will look better or worse.

For example, a few weeks ago, i was discussing with a friend a Portuguese book that we read "Ventos Cruzados"(Crossed Winds), it's a work that rely in metaphors and vague descriptions and this go from the first to the last page, i love that way to make prose, but my friend prefer a more traditional romance dialogue. In result to me the work is a 8, but to he is a 5.5 and this difference is practically all in the way that we evaluate the writing style. 

This question stated in this thread is entirely about your personal perception of the matter. Forget about objectivity. Of course we all care about different aspects of writing, that's kind of why I don't like chuuni writing, despite its popularity.

Edited December 11, 2016 by Funnerific

[Sovapex]

9 hours ago, Norleas said:

One reminder that writing is a subjective aspect in some areas, some people think that is a fixed matter that you could arbitrary evaluate, but depending of the writer the same phrase could be written in totally different ways, more direct, more metaphorical, too verbal, solid descriptions, vague prose and much more styles. All could have the same quality in general, but depending of taste of who is reading it will look better or worse.

For example, a few weeks ago, i was discussing with a friend a Portuguese book that we read "Ventos Cruzados"(Crossed Winds), it's a work that rely in metaphors and vague descriptions and this go from the first to the last page, i love that way to make prose, but my friend prefer a more traditional romance dialogue. In result to me the work is a 8, but to he is a 5.5 and this difference is practically all in the way that we evaluate the writing style. 

Man, I really cannot get on the same wavelength as you. I kind of get what you're saying to an extent, you're saying some people will like certain writing styles less than others, but your examples don't jive. Like, you seem to suggest that 'vague descriptions' can have the same amount of quality as 'solid descriptions'. How? If you can't even decipher what something means easily, it messes with the reader's pace. Keep that up, and it will put them off. Sounds fundamentally bad to me. 

Decent writing doesn't confuse you. Good writing is smart, it can make you think without breaking you out of your pace, and entertain you. I don't see why someone would rate a writing style worse because it does something different whilst still retaining good quality. 

 

[Norleas]

27 minutes ago, Sovapex said:

Man, I really cannot get on the same wavelength as you. I kind of get what you're saying to an extent, you're saying some people will like certain writing styles less than others, but your examples don't jive. Like, you seem to suggest that 'vague descriptions' can have the same amount of quality as 'solid descriptions'. How? If you can't even decipher what something means easily, it messes with the reader's pace. Keep that up, and it will put them off. Sounds fundamentally bad to me. 

Decent writing doesn't confuse you. Good writing is smart, it can make you think without breaking you out of your pace, and entertain you. I don't see why someone would rate a writing style worse because it does something different whilst still retaining good quality. 

 

The break point here is how you value the reader pace, to me each work has its own pace, like a painting, the author have something to say, but he could say clearly like a picture or dark like a cubist art. Another thing is that good writers know how to use language figures and vague descriptions to enchant the words, in the example that i cited the author use mataphor and vagueness to make the reader reflect about the society. In this way a good text will not confuse you, but open room to more interpretations.